FAST LANE

“People seem to think I disappeared or something. I just needed a break after ‘Cotton Club.’ ”

Diane Lane, a veteran at 22 (she was 13 when she starred in “A Little Romance”), self-imposed a two-year hiatus and now she’s done three films in a row.

She was speaking from Geneva, where she’d gone for a break after wrapping “After the Rain,” a fantasy-love story shot in Italy with Christopher Lambert. Charles Finch (son of the late Peter Finch) directs.

She’ll be strutting her stuff--literally--as a stripper in “The Big Town,” due in September from Columbia. The film, set in 1957, reunites her with Matt Dillon, her heartthrob on and off the screen (“The Outsiders” and “Rumblefish”) in teen-age years past.

“ ‘Big Town’ is really his (Dillon’s) movie. I’m a co-star. I play a bad girl--an adulteress, the whole bit.”

The “whole bit” includes a strip routine, complete with pasties and fans. Said Lane: “I go as far as a stripper could go in 1957. It was a great fantasy, really. I worked on my dance for about two months. It was like gymnastics--I even do the splits. When we finally filmed it, it seemed strange. There were all these crew members looking at me. I pretended they were horny sailors--or whoever the guys were who filled up a ‘50s stripper club.”

Next: “Lady Beware,” due in November from Scotti Bros. Pictures. Directed by Karen Arthur, it’s about a window dresser (Lane) relentlessly pursued by a dangerous man.

Then: the completion of the house she’s building “a football toss away from my mom’s house” in Georgia. “It’s a couple hours outside of Atlanta, in the middle of nowhere, where Ace Hardware and Dairy Lane are where it’s happening.”